Thursday, October 23, 2014

Garrisons and Professions: Spotlight on Alchemy and the Alchemy Lab

This post in one in a series of posts that will be in regards to garrisons and professions in Warlords of Draenor and how they interact with each other, and on their own.

Unlike previous expansions professions are much more involved this expansion, even if somewhat simplified at the same time. Being tied to buildings in the garrisons it not only opens up more options but different options to either supplement a profession you already have or fill the role of a profession you do not have.

Note: As warlords is still in beta, it is possible some of this information might change before the expansion is released.

The
Treatise, once clicked on and learned, will boost your maximum alchemy
skill to 700 and will teach you all of the following skills. Alchemical
Cataclysm and Secrets of Draenor Alchemy, which you should start doing
immediately as they are cooldown abilities as well as Draenic
Invisibility Potion, Draenic Living Action Potion, Draenic Mana Potion,
Draenic Swiftness Potion, Pure Rage Potion, Draenic Water Breathing
Elixir and Draenic Water Walking Elixir.

All other alchemy potions listed above but not listed as being learned from the treatise will need to be purchased with the currency you create from the daily cooldown for secrets of draenor alchemy.

If you have the alchemy lab in your garrison there will be Albert de Hyde (horde) and Mary Kearie (alliance) whom you can purchases the plans from right there in your alchemy lab. If you do not have an alchemy lab on your garrison you can travel to your hub near ashran and purchase the plans there from Joshua Alverez (horde) or Katherine Joplin (alliance).

Once you have learned everything there is to learn, you can continue to make secrets of draenor alchemy to purchase a small pouch of coins. It remains to be seen if this will be worthwhile come live but it is nice to see that there might still be a reason to keep doing the daily secret cooldown after the 27 days it would take to purchase all the recipes.

Spotlight on the Alchemy Lab:

This section will contain two parts. One if you have alchemy as a profession, one if you do not.

If you have Alchemy as a Profession:

Level 1 Alchemy Lab:
Once you complete the small quest, mentioned above, that will award you the garrison blueprint for a level 1 alchemy lab and you will be able to build your alchemy lab.
A level 1 alchemy lab will take 1 hour to build and requires 150 gold and 50 garrison resources.
A level 1 alchemy lab allows you to produce 7 work orders at a time.

Level 2 Alchemy Lab:
A level 2 alchemy lab requires you to have a level 2 town hall.
A level 2 alchemy lab requires you to have set up your talador outpost or be level 96.
A level 2 alchemy lab will take 1 hour to build and requires 300 gold and 100 garrison resources.
A level 2 alchemy lab allows you to produce 14 work at a time.
A level 2 alchemy lab allows you to assign a follower with the alchemy trait to work at the lab.

The blueprints for the level 2 alchemy lab is available for
purchase, after you meet the requirements listed above, from Rezlak (horde) or Sparz Bolttwist (alliance) in your
garrison town hall for 750 gold.
Alternatively you can purchase the blueprints with an Outpost Building Assembly Notes item from Torgg Flexington (horde) or Kinkade Jakobs (alliance) at your ashran base.
Two copies of Outpost Building Assembly Notes can be obtained free from
questing by completing the outpost quest line, in both Spires of Arak and
Gorgrond. This could effectively save you 1500 gold.

Level 3 Alchemy Lab:
A level 3 alchemy lab requires you to have a level 3 town hall.
A level 3 alchemy lab requires you to have completed the [Working More Orders] achievement and be level 100.
A level 3 alchemy lab will take 1 hour to build and requires 500 gold and 300 garrison resources.
A level 3 alchemy lab will allow you to produce 21 work orders at a time.

The blueprints for the level 3 alchemy lab are available for purchase, after you meet the requirements listed above,
from Rezlak (horde) or Sparz Bolttwist (alliance) in your garrison town
hall for 1000 gold.

Work Orders:

Alchemy work orders require 5 frostweed to produce and each order takes 4 hours to finish. It will award you with an alchemical catalyst and sometimes a sorcerous water or a sorcerous fire. Having a higher level lab, which allows you to produce more work orders, means you need to log in to check less often. Orders will stack up if you are not online for a while and you will not miss out on anything. So if you have a 21 order queue you would only need to collect your products and place new orders every 84 hours, which is three and a half days, making this fantastic for those alts you sometimes forget to log into.

Working Follower:

Once your alchemy lab reaches level 2 you will be allowed to assign a worker to help there. The worker must have alchemy as a trait as not just any worker can be assigned to any building. A follower working in any garrison building does not gain experience. Consider leveling your follower first before placing them as a worker in one of your buildings. Workers at the alchemy lab have a small chance to increase the materials you get when filling work orders, depending on their level, the higher the better of course. Also, if you have a follower working at your alchemy lab you will receive a daily alchemy quest entitled Alchemy Experiment which will award you with 3-5 low value draenor alchemy potions or flasks.

Pros to having the profession:

Increased catalyst generation to make more flasks, chance for additional materials from work orders.

If you do not have Alchemy as a Profession:

Most things will remain the same with a few notable exceptions.
You will not be able to build an alchemy lab on your garrison until you level your town hall to level 2.
Once you have a level 2 town hall you learn all level 1 profession building blueprints, so do not worry that you were incapable of doing the quest.
You will be able to make all potions and all lesser flasks that an alchemist can make in your alchemy lab.
The potions will require you to have a level 2 alchemy lab to make them.
The lesser flasks will require you to have a level 3 alchemy lab to make them.
You will notbe able to make any of the greater flasks.

Cons to not having alchemy profession:

No reason to do work orders because you can not make the greater flasks that require the catalysts that come from work orders. As alchemical catalysts are bind on pick up you would be wasting resources to create something you have no use for.

Catching up or Switching to Alchemy in Warlords:

Even as a level 1 alchemist you can do the quest that will get you the alchemy lab plans for your garrison along with the treatise which when learned teaches you most of the alchemy potions. Also, as a side bonus, even if you are a skill level 1, once you use the treatise you will attain a max level of 700, meaning no need to ever go back to train up again.

These potions, while being native to draenor do not need a high profession skill level to create. This means you can level up from 1 to catching up, through making potions with just draenor based materials.

In addition to that there are many items you can find in the world that will help increase your alchemy and will speed you along up to skill level 600, where you will now be working on current content. All drops that start these skill gaining quests by dropping these items require an alchemy skill level of 1, so you can start from the bottom up. All of these are turned in at your garrison.

24 comments:

This post was awesome and the idea that I can get my alchemy skill from 1-700 without having to tromp through the old world/BC/Wrath/Cata/Panda is pretty sweet too. Do all the respective profession buildings have their own catch up mechanism? Thanks :)

If you want to spend the time gathering in current content, or spending some gold on the AH, then you can level alchemy from 1 to 700 on draenor. You might even be able to do it in one day with a bit of grinding.

And to answer your question, yes, all professions, except skinning for some odd reason, have a catch up like this. Even secondary ones like first aid and cooking.

Like Jaeger said, I believe it's better organized than Wowhead and it contains more details.

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the medium buildings, and the pros and cons to choosing them when you consider how many toons you play on a server to use for garrisons. For instance, on one server I plan on playing just one, another server at least 3 for garrisons.

Again, thanks for the amount of research you've done, it's been very helpful.

I did, or course, use wowhead for much of my collection. I am just floating around with that, some other stuff, and my experiences on the beta, to try and gather the data I am looking for and hope it helps others as well.

I will be getting to other buildings after I am done with the profession ones. Mostly because I feel the profession ones offer a lot of information as it is like 2 things at once, professions and buildings. Then I will go over my opinions and suggestions. I too have some servers with many characters and some with only 1.

I was thinking the same. I can, and most likely, will C & P the format of this one for the other profession ones to save some time.

The idea is to do all the profession small buildings with professions, because people myself included, want to know what is going on with professions. And then just doing a round up of the rest in their own topics.

For the longest time I was thinking alchemy escaped the profession hack job.

Just recently it got partly hacked losing the 2 hour flasks. But as jaeger said, the specializations are still there. I think it is an over sight and not intended to get cut too as they are the last profession perk, so to speak, left in the game at the moment.

@Tess & Jaeger, I agree, transmute will be the only viable one to have at face value.

But if you do have one that can make invisibility potions, being the old ones are 18 seconds and the new ones are 18 seconds, why not make the old ones and proc them, they are just as good as the new ones and you have a chance to double or even triple your gold thanks to being a potion master.

Something to consider. But only if you have the old 18 second one will that work.

Wow are you saying that we won't ever have to bother with levelling professions again? A total oversight on my part! Until now I've tried to level up an alt army with all professions and specialisations but got stuck when it came to levelling professions. If that goes away I'll just have to level a few twinks to 100 and maintain a few garrisons right?

Basically. You can make all the starter stuff at level one. Nothing to to prevent them for adding the better stuff later expansion needing 700 for it, but for now, at the get go, nope, you do not even need to level your profession any longer.

Might as well level them up. :)

The only things worth leveling, from my experience, are gatherers. While you can herb, mine or skin at level one, you do not get anything. You get parts of an herb, ore or skin. If you want full ones, you need to level them up.

Of course this does not count for the garrison mine and garden, as those you will always get full pieces from even if you do not have the gathering profession.

Which makes skinning the most valuable profession to level in the game now as I see it.

yup i wondered why there was a mine, a garden and even a fishing pond but no way to get hides. luckily, i've got a fairly high leveled worgen.

what about the books you mentionned? using them means going from 1 straight to 700, doesn't it? so there's no point in levelling them, i'll just have to do the normal questing and eventually the book will drop for me. or did i misunderstand something?

Yeap, you will get the quest that gives you the book within the first 20 quests, maybe less. Things like skinning, herbing, mining, cooking, fishing, and archeology you get usually the first time you use the profession. First aid is a random drop.

Unlike most other professions' "special" ingredient, Alchemical Catalysts are not BoP. They can be mailed, traded, even listed on the AH. As such, depending on the relative value of Frostweed to the Catalysts, it might be worthwhile to do the work orders even if you are not an alchemist.

Yeah, noticed that change and think it was a great change. Even more so being they removed the need for them for the lesser potions. Glad blizzard noticed that one. Now if only they would be so kind as to do that with other ones. I would love if all of them were at least BoA. Could make so much stuff faster that way.